Profile

Search

Search form

You are here

Stronger Families through Baked Goods Consumption

This week at church, our bishop challenged us to come up with a goal for our family for the coming year. He asked us to choose one thing to add to or take away from our lives that would bring us closer together as a family. So we had a family meeting.

First, Dan asked the kids if they knew what a goal was. Magoo said, “Me! Me! It’s when you win the game!” Apparently he’s been watching a lot of hockey in his spare time.

This week at church, our bishop challenged us to come up with a goal for our family for the coming year. He asked us to choose one thing to add to or take away from our lives that would bring us closer together as a family. So we had a family meeting.

First, Dan asked the kids if they knew what a goal was. Magoo said, “Me! Me! It’s when you win the game!” Apparently he’s been watching a lot of hockey in his spare time.

Wanda just sat there in her swing like an INFANT and offered no insight whatsoever. She’s kind of been acting like the family freeloader lately.

Laylee said, “A goal is a plan that you come up with that you can do like if I said I was gonna be nice to Magoo for like seven years or something.”

Dan stifled a giggle. So seven years of kindness-in-plenty until Magoo turns 12, and then 7 years of famine ensue? Nice. But she had the definition of “goal” right, something we can plan to do, preferably with a timeline and some specific details mapped out. Then Dan opened the floor for suggestions. Here’s what we came up with:

Eat more cookies together. Magoo was the first to chime in. He came up with this goal, specifying chocolate cookies would be best.

Make more cookies. Laylee enjoys eating cookies but she felt that a better goal would involve the process of making them, specifically eating the dough and tasting the sugar, along with the aforementioned chowing down on the round sweet treats.

Dance more. I don’t want you to get the impression from this goal that we have been neglecting our parental duty of getting our freak on with our progeny. Quite the contrary. We have dance parties quite frequently Chez Thompson. This goal suggestion only goes to show that more dancing can only serve to strengthen family relationships.

Play more games together. Magoo suggested games you can play on the TV, specifically Wii games, more specifically 4-player Wii games, more specifically can we stop talking about this and go play Super Mario RIGHT NOW?

Do service for others at least once a week as a family. Can you spot a Mom suggestion a mile away? Yeah. Well we’re gonna do it and we’re gonna like it. Got a problem with that? Everybody was pretty much on board with this one when I said that “service” could include making cookies for someone and taking them over to their house. I suppose we could even dance while we’re baking or delivering the cookies. The kids decided that service didn’t sound too bad.

Get back to sharing the best and worst parts of each of our days during our dinner conversation each night. This is a tradition we did every night for a couple of years. We’ve sort of dropped it recently but Dan suggested we pick it up again. It was frequently fun and always enlightening.

Teach each other more songs. This one came from Laylee who has, to date, written about 4.7 million songs and is always willing to teach them to anyone who’s got an hour and about 80 gigs of brain RAM available. We wrote this goal on the list but I’m-a-hopin’ it’s not one we work on frequently.

Play the “I Like You” game more. We like to sit around the dinner table and point at each other in succession scream/saying “I liiike YOU!” We start out slow and quiet and quickly build to a total frenzy with fingers flying all around the table and people choking on the words as they yell and giggle, “I like YOU! I like YOU! I like YOU! I liiiiike YOU!” over and over and over again. I don’t know how this particular tradition got started but it’s definitely a keeper.

So that’s what we wrote, and when it was time to vote on the one thing we would choose for our family goal, Dan made an executive decision and declared that we would focus on all 8 goals this year. Now normally I’d say that it’s impossible to successfully work on that many things at once. However, each of these goals has at least one rabid sponsor who will work tirelessly to be sure that their agenda is front and center. I have no doubt that Laylee and Magoo will be sure to monitor how often we’re making and eating cookies, playing games, dancing, and yelling loving words at each other. I’ll try to focus on the other stuff.